The Annunciation

Gabriel kneels before the Virgin, and behind him kneels a second angel. That companion is rare in an Annunciation, and the Louvre singles it out in its own description of the panel. In the gold at the upper left God the Father appears, sending his rays down towards Mary, who sits in a small open chamber hung with patterned cloth.

The panel is wider than it is tall and has been cut down on all four sides, most of all at the top and bottom. In 1999 the Louvre presented it as a fragment of a predella, the strip of small scenes along the foot of an altarpiece, and dates it to around 1335. It reached Paris in 1861 with the collection of the Marquis Campana in Rome, and the first French catalogue, in 1862, gave it to Simone Memmi, with a question mark. That name was an old conflation of two Sienese painters, Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, which is a long way from Daddi's Florence. On the back, under a coat of blue, an older priming survives, decorated in places with arabesques.